


Tempus Mortis

by MathildaHilda



Category: The Haunting of Hill House (TV 2018), The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bittersweet Ending, Canonical Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Kind of a character study, Non-Canonical Character Death, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person, POV Third Person, unreliable narrators
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2019-10-08 13:36:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17387315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: (He was a father of five.Death couldn’t change that.)





	1. Tempus Mortis

**Author's Note:**

> I use parentheses waaaaaay too much.
> 
> I tried sticking as close to canon as possible, but idk how this thing actually came to be.
> 
> Title is latin for "time of death"

Christmas of 1992 had been a sullen affair with snapped words and noses wiped on sleeves, a slightly charred turkey and presents under a tree that had been attacked with ornaments in pink and yellow and blue and red glitter.

The youngest Crain had cried into her father’s neck when it had come to give presents while the oldest devoured the book and wrote in the margin about the things she’d share with her brother next time she went to see him. Theo just picked a hole in her old gloves and Luke had pestered Aunt Janet for sweet things that weren’t gingerbread men.

Four kids and two adults and it should’ve seemed like any other family on Christmas with disappointed kids and a slight bit of chaos, but there were barely any smiles the Christmas of ‘92.

Christmas years later hadn’t been much better, but Nellie Crain had stopped writing to Santa in ‘93 and spent Christmas Eve staring at old photos until she’d imagined conversations between them, wishing them happy holidays and hoping that Mom got that book she wanted, and that Steve got that fancy pen he’d wanted after the typewriter.

(She bought them both, years later, and buried them in shallow holes over deeper ones and shivered when something reached back.)

Shirley had spent the Christmas before she met Kevin in the cemetery, reading from Luke’s botched and abandoned script about Hill House and imagined Steve’s laugh and suggestions about things that could be changed and his smile because he would be so proud that his brother had written something.

(Even if it was about the House.)

***

They didn’t remember it the same, no one ever does in traumatic events, but Hugh remembered enough.

He remembered shoving the kids into the car. Remembered running back inside for Steve. Remembered wrapping him in his arms and running out the door; away from the House and Liv and the dead child in the Red Room, not knowing that he left something else behind.

He was a father of five.

Death didn’t change that.

He’d buried his son and his wife, the law branding her deranged and a murderer and eventually they became the Crazy Crains’ for claiming otherwise, because who had met Olivia at any point in her life and thought ‘ _she’s a murderer’?_

So, he didn’t tell them the truth about Steve or about Mom until Nell was gone and Theo threw the autopsy results in his face the day before the wake; drunk and grieving and  _empty_ , and all he could do was be silent, because his wife whispered in his ear and two of his kids were gone and the other three were mirrors of each other in anger and confusion.

(He was a father of five.

Death couldn’t change that.)

***

Steve ran down the hall from the right when Nell entered, and he smiled so pure and sweet that she couldn’t help but smile back and point to the left when he asked, and so she watched him disappear once again.

She almost followed, but stopped. Her family was here and wasn’t and it shook her to her very core, because this was what she’d always wanted.

She was home.

She was upstairs when Steve came to her, eyes wide and dark and words muffled as if coming from underwater and she almost asked him what he’d said when he’s suddenly gone and replaced with Shirley, small and smiling and promising tea parties on the moon.

He looked up at her in the moments before she fell, eyes still dark and scared and she wanted to ask Mommy why he looked so scared when she found herself so terribly afraid and the railing clutched tightly between her fingers.

She fell and Steve gripped her tight when she screamed the years of fear away from deprived lungs.

He was here. He was real.

Mommy’s here. She was something else.

***

Shirley doesn’t want to look.

Shirley never wants to look.

(But Shirley has to look.)

She saw her big brother, so much smaller and not much older than Jayden, with bruised fingers and bloodshot eyes and she knew the mortician took them out and threw them away, because dead people don’t need to see, but her brother has always known how to look.

_(He just never knew how to see.)_

The mortician took his eyes and fixed him, but Shirley knew him well enough to see the broken parts.

He gripped her hand and whispered her name, muffled and broken as if he was speaking from far away. ‘ _And perhaps he is far away’_ , she thought before he woke her up, because he’s gone and she’s not, but they’re both in the House and both a little more broken.

She woke up first, long before Theo and long before Luke stopped choking on himself and died and belonged, just a little bit, to the House. She brought Luke back, and with Luke came Nell, while Steve was there all along and pressed hands to his head as if though it hurt.

Theo came to, coughed on air before Luke did, and her eyes saw their brother first and then Nell, where they stood whispering into the nothingness of the Red Room.

She was the first to hear Steve’s words without the water and without the distance and it broke her heart, because he was just like the kids she treated.

 _‘It’s the House.’_ He whispered and Theo banged on the door before Dad gave in and the secrets belonged to Shirley.

Theo went alone with Luke to the hospital, Siri shouting directions from the passenger seat while Dad told Shirley a story about loss and secrets and death and pain and left five kids being three and orphans in a world always meant to be too cruel.

***

He tossed dirt on his sister’s casket just as he’d done twice before, when Mom gripped his arm and begged him to stay and Nell begged him to go. Dad pulled him up and fed reality into emotion and illusion and Steve just stared from beyond the trees.

(That’s all they seemed to do. The ghosts.

They just stared and wished for better things.)

Neither of them saw Steve the night of the storm, just as they didn’t see Nell and didn’t see either one of them the night they both disappeared and shouted their throats raw in a dark and hungry house.

(Children often run in circles around themselves before they’re told where to go.

Steve and Nell ran circles around each other, trying to find an exit, when all along there never really was one.)

Dad found the script he wrote for Hill House the same night Theo threw a paper file at his chest and demanded the truth, and there’s both pride and fear in his voice, because those eyes were no longer blue, and the truth is far worse than the web they’d spun around themselves.

Stevie died. Mom died.

(Abigail died.

But no one knows Abigail. The truth is different in the night.)

_Mommy killed Stevie._

The House killed Mom and it killed Nell, and for once in a very long time, Luke and Dad knows the same thing. But they’re not there together when Luke tried to burn it down, tried to let the flames tear the devil to pieces.

Luke was alone and he heard them, faintly, calling for him when the woman with the molden hands and the red hair put him to sleep and left him to die.

Steve’s not in the Red Room with Mom and Abigail and Nell  _and_   _the House_  and he didn’t ask why until Nell did. Mom’s smile was gone, and her tears were back, but she tried to smile again and whispered that  _he was in his room_ and it didn’t quite make sense because Steve was  _good_.

He didn’t ask about Steve’s room until Mom talked about robins and roses and houses and Nell woke him up. And then he choked on the question and the air itself. Steve just stood by the door,  _in the_   _Room_ , with his hands over his ears and eyes snapped shut.

_(Steve was always in his Room.)_

He’d called it a house without reason once, a long time ago, when he’d stared at the photo they took outside it and remembered the excitement of that first day.

Remembered the fear of that last one.

Dad had carried Steve to the car, limp arms and legs and eyes closed as if in sleep, but he never went into the motel with them. Shirley was the adult, no objection, and Dad and Steve were gone and that was that.

Dad came later, too much later, and had had to tell his kids; his  _four_ kids, that big brother and Mommy wasn’t coming home.

***

She was alone with the case work when she found it and almost tore the truth apart in her hands. She remembered as well as a traumatized child could, and remembered the way Steve had hung in Dad’s arms and just how cold he felt even with the layers of clothes and seats and adrenaline between them.

The House, and whatever Grandma Mary and Mom had passed on, had told her then and there that everything was gone. Doctors were supposed to fix things; but no one could fix what she felt when she’d stared down into those caskets.

She was alone at the family plot and saw Mr. Smiley hiding behind the mausoleum further down the path when Shirley called and told her Nell was gone.

She wished she’d felt something.

But all she felt was nothing.

(It wasn’t like what she felt when she touched Nell, later, deep into the cold pit of Shirley’s perfect home, but it was close enough.)

She kissed her bare fingertips and touched them lightly to the stone, said her sorrys and goodbyes, and left in her car to mourn on her sister’s porch with a whiskey in hand. Because she couldn’t help Steve and Mom, but at least she could try to help Shirley and Luke and maybe Dad.

She was drunk and empty and alone  _(and maybe a little scared)_ when she gripped the paper tight from her bag and waved it loud and brash about her father’s face. She made them see. They shouldn’t have seen, she figured out later when it only made the coming day so much worse.

She saw Steve, back to her and turned to Nell’s casket, and she ran and blamed it on the vodka, because running was something the Crains’ had always been good at and the hole inside her was already swallowing her up.

(She felt something in the dark and broke something between the only sister she had left, but a part of her was okay with that because at least she wasn’t alone anymore.)

Mom crawled from around the desk, skull cracked and voice pleading and just as broken, and she knew her father saw her too.

She saw Steve again, in the mirror in the bathroom after she’d thrown up, and she hit her head against the wall and the pain of that didn’t help with the hangover and her shouting match with Shirley.

If she had asked her child self to describe the House, just like she asked all the kids she treated to describe scary things, she’d say that the House was like a shark.

It can smell the blood, taste the blood and no matter the amount; it’ll always want more.

 

***

It only hurts if he remembers, so he doesn’t.

But when he does, all he remembers is dreaming, choking and shouting for his Dad in a house too big and too dark.

He remembers the sound of a car disappearing into the night, the sound of someone crying and then the horrid crash of something falling.

He doesn’t quite know what it is until it’s too late and Mom, dressed in white, comes to him with outstretched arms and promises that it’ll be okay.

(There’s a little girl dressed in blue and she looks so sad that it almost makes him afraid.

He’s not afraid until the car comes back, and his Dad screams.)

He remembers running across the halls and down the stairs, up the spiral one in the library and stop with his breath caught in his throat when the little girl comes to him, hand in hand with her mother, and his father standing beyond them, eyes wide and teary and blood on his clothes.

He remembers being wrapped in his father’s arms and he remembers crying, because something wasn’t right, and it was okay to cry if you were sad or scared.

His father apologizes and all he does is stare, because ‘ _why is Dad apologizing_?’

He remembers and dreams and wishes for something else, but this is all he can get. Shirley can’t see him, only talk to him in her sleep and Theo can’t feel him, no matter how hard he tries.

He runs alone in a House fed with memories and dreams and avoids Mom in all but dreams, because the House  _wants,_ and it  _takes,_ and he  _doesn’t_. Dad comes, so much time and so many unwritten stories later and Steve wishes, for a moment, that he hadn’t.

Luke sees him in small flashes after the high has ended and he’s left miserable in the street, but he sees him even clearer after both Nell and the drugs are gone, and Steve knows he thinks he’s losing his mind until the House refuses to burn and  _wants even more._

Dad never sees him. Not even during the storm when Theo knew the truth and saw him when there was nothing left but grief and Shirley shouted herself raw before the casket fell.

It’s a house without reason, but something built on hate and fear was no house at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These kids need a break.
> 
> (Good thing I've got another angsty, most likely multi-chapter, story coming their way.)
> 
> Also, the House's/Olivia's hostility toward Steve is based on the fact that it tried "taking" the twins, but got Abigail, Steve and Olivia instead, hence why Steve's not really interacting with it like the other ghosts or Nell (I think/hope that makes some sort of sense)


	2. when did you know?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He asks, and you don’t answer. You don’t answer, because you don’t have one to give.
> 
> (”When did you know?”)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, so this thing wasn't supposed to get a part two, but I was inspired by a very lovely comment on the previous part; when did Hugh realize that Steve was gone?
> 
> Well, I guess this is an answer.

I want you to ask yourself this;

When did you know?

Was it when he didn’t wake up, trapped by covers and blankets and growing limbs? Or, was it before, when Shirley held Nellie close in the back of the car and Luke was crying into Theo’s shoulder, missing Mom and the dead little girl in the Room?

Did you know? Did you learn before, or didn’t you ever learn?

You told Stevie to keep his eyes closed, told him even though he wasn’t listening. And, if he was listening, you hoped he would stay quiet and still, eyes closed to the horrors of the House and the sounds of the corridor.

Maybe you knew when you got down the stairs, heard Liv scream for you, and Steve remained limp and young in your arms, simply an older version of that baby you lulled to sleep every night until he was two.

But, perhaps, the most glaring point of you learning, knowing, come to you when you park the car and wait for him. Wait for your son, who refuses to move. Your son, who is still huddled in his arms and legs, mouth slightly open and brows evenly smoothed. Your son, who looks asleep.

And that’s what scares you.

Maybe that’s when you knew.

Shirley; small, brave and terrified Shirley, stares you down, nods twice and takes her little brother’s hand when you bolt out the door, locks it behind you and let something broken out of your throat.

You unfold him from his sleeping shape, pray to some god that there will be a beat against your fingertips, and bite down on the knuckles of your hand when nothing but the cold pushes against the pads of your fingers. Bite, until you taste the blood.

Bite, until someone wakes you up.

You don’t want to leave him in the car, the thought a morbid one, but you have to. You drive back to the House, park in the drive and dash inside; because if the twins were to be believed, something you desperately needed right now, there was some slim chance that someone was still here. That there are answers to the questions in your head.

Instead of answers, you find your wife.

And then you scream. You sob, wail and wish for someone to wake you up, but you can’t bite yourself hard enough to break a bone, to snap yourself awake, when this whole goddamn thing is just your own, personal, and very real nightmare.

The Dudleys’ come, pale shadows in a dark light, looks down to you with something like knowledge in their eyes, and their eyes ask you this;

When did you know?

The little girl; small and pale and dead, comes to her mother, her dress a periwinkle blue and her pajamas stained with the reflection of death, and you’re almost, just barely, prepared to see your son.

You hear him first. Panic and fear and confusion, not on the same level as when he broke the bowl you got as a wedding gift, but it’s still there. Your son is afraid, but he doesn’t know why.

He asks you a question, begs for an answer, and cries into the crook of your neck. Your son, forever the age before he would grow angry, is small in your arms and you hold him there. Liv passes, just another shadow, and you want to hold her too.

It just won’t let you.

You beg forgiveness. Steve, the kid who either forgave too easy or not at all, shakes his head, takes a breath and doesn’t speak. Doesn’t say it’s okay, because it really isn’t. He doesn’t say anything.

He just stops, and stares and grips your arm.

There are days where you have to go to the House, have to tell the officers everything, have to explain what happened. What you think happened. Because you’re not sure, and Steve can’t tell.

Steve can only look. And then he asks, when everything is done, and Mom is the one named insane in the papers for no other reason than that everyone needed a scapegoat. You don’t, because Steve didn’t blame Mom. You don’t, because you know.

He asks, and you don’t answer. You don’t answer, because you don’t have one to give.

 

(”When did you know?”)

 

That’s what you don’t know. You wish you did, but there are no words good enough to explain to yourself and the kid you love, that you don’t know. You look at him and wish him the world. You look at him, and say the things you never can say.

Brave, stubborn Steve tells you to go. And you do, with a heavy heart and that trapped grief in your eyes.

You come back, later, when everything’s wrong again and Liv smiles at you once more. You come back when you’ve seen her and Steve dance at Nell’s wedding; shuffling around on unsure feet, because neither of you ever were much of a dancer and Steve seemed to have inherited that trait.

You come back, when Theo told the truth and Nell is gone. When your family was cracking toward the middle, when the cracks had always stared at you from the corner and spindled its way upward. The House is a chisel to the marble that is your family; it had tapped it once, and twice, and thrice.

You come back, but you don’t see your oldest son until you give up the House. Give it up to Shirley to hide and protect. You see him and he smiles and takes Nell’s hand, holds it tight and holds it close. You smile too, but it’s a sad one.

You stare into the eyes of your wife; the eyes of the House, and watch as the chisel comes down a fourth time. You’re their Dad. You’re supposed to protect them.

So that’s what you did.


	3. death, be not proud

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (“Your eyes are black, Sugar.”)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING; this chapter contains mentioned self-inflicted bodily harm to a minor!
> 
> I keep lying to myself about this thing being finished, but you guys keep giving me ideas!
> 
> Title from;
> 
> "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee  
> Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;  
> For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow  
> Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.  
> From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,  
> Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,  
> And soonest our best men with thee do go,  
> Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.  
> Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,  
> And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,  
> And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well  
> And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?  
> One short sleep past, we wake eternally  
> And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die."

That’s the thing about death, he suspects; it’s like a dream within a dream trapped in a nightmare and surrounded by the things that you can’t touch anymore and have to leave behind.

Death is memories, questions you forgot to ask when you were alive and the answers to those same questions that you should never have found out about, simply because you were too blind to reach for it when you could still do such things.

Death is dark and scary, more so than it perhaps should be, given the where and the how of his own, very untimely death.

He’s twelve, after all.

Twelve-year old’s shouldn’t be dead.

He sees Dad rush out, carrying something heavy in his arms, breath caught in his throat and panic blinding him to Steve himself; trapped as he is in the corner of the room Luke favored as a hiding place whenever they played hide-and-seek. Steve can see now; now, when it’s dark and foreboding and strange, that it is a very good hiding place.

 

(He just wishes he didn’t know about it.)

 

It’s too good, and Dad’s gone before Steve can open his mouth, let the laugh slip and reveal his hiding place. But he’s not six, not like Luke and Nellie, and he hasn’t played anything but the seeker for at least two years. He’s a big boy now, he shouldn’t have to hide from his siblings.

He shouldn’t have to hide from Dad.

But he does, and he doesn’t leave his corner until he hears tires on gravel and the way the gravel spews onto each other and onto the grass, as if the car was started suddenly and without warning.

Death is blindness and darkness and confusion so powerful that you can’t really see what’s going on until you stop trying to understand it. But it takes Steve an hour or so to stop trying.

 

(Acceptance, he’s learned, is slow and tedious. It takes longer than it should in his opinion. It shouldn’t take any time at all.

Especially not when you’re not really there anymore.)

 

It’s an hour where he tries to find the source of the banging in the walls, knocking in frantic waves and finds the source of it in a black-eyed boy with wheels in the place of his legs, dangling from how high up he sits. He hears laughter, follows it through the hallways and finds the little girl, white ribbon adorning her hair and yellow and red teeth parting her chapped lips into a smile.

The red is on her lips too, and it makes her look just like Shirley when she stole Mom’s lipstick when she was five.

He doesn’t smile back, simply turns and disappears around a corner; away, away, away.

Away, until he stops running and the woman with the old clothes cocks her head to the side and looks down at him. She smiles too, and Steve backs away until his back meets something solid and his fingers weave into the wool of someone’s pants. Someone very tall.

He doesn’t turn, and yet still, he knows. Knows it’s the tall man who stole Luke’s hat.

Steve doesn’t believe, never has; Steve simply knows.

He stares into the woman’s eyes and she folds herself forward, breath smelling of mold as she huffs a laugh. Her red hair tangles in itself and creates a golden halo around her face, her eyes a wispy white, and her earrings makes a distant, clinking sound. Maybe she’d been very pretty when she’d been alive.

Steve was pretty sure she wasn’t alive anymore.

 _“Your eyes are black, Sugar.”_ She says and traces a finger across his cheek, the ghost of a touch, and now Steve runs again. Away from the woman and the man, away from the knocking in the walls and away from the smiling little girl with yellow and red teeth.

He runs until he can’t, and finds the man with the handlebar moustache looking at him with those same empty eyes he always has. Death is scary, but Steve doesn’t scream. He wishes he would, but he stops himself, turns on a dime and finds the mirror at the end of the hall.

Stares at the reflection; pale and cold and haunted. (Pale and cold and  _dead._ ) Stares at the black eyes, red where the it’s supposed to be white, too dark where it’s simply supposed to be brown.

 

(Mom had always said he’d inherited Grandma Mary’s eyes; Steve wonders, for a bleak moment, if her eyes had been black too.)

 

He curls his fingers around himself, presses his fingertips into his eyes and pushes the eyelids open to see more. See how far the black goes, the red. Shifts his hair to see how far the purple goes. Pauses, frozen, when he sees the purple of his nails, the blood scratched and old beneath them.

He presses his fingers  _(purple. Why are they purple?)_ into his eyes and claws.

He doesn’t rub his eyes the way you would rub the sleep away, or scratch it the way you’d scratch it if you had an itch.

He claws and rips and pulls at the black and the red until he screams.

 _“Your eyes are black, Sugar.”_ The woman’s voice echoes, and Steve trips one of the statues when he runs away from the mirror, his eyes still just as black and red. His cheeks are flushed a different shade, caked and frozen on pale cheeks.

Steve had never seen a dead person before. He’d seen dead animals, what kid hadn’t at some point?, but people were just a little more different.

Especially people you’d once known.

He’d never seen a dead person, but he’d been told stories about death when Mike’s Mom passed away in second grade and Mike didn’t come back to school for a month. Told the stories of a paradise, and about how some believed someone they loved was waiting for them on the other side; angels and God and different parts of every different belief.

Steve had decided early on, that if he died, he wanted Grandma Mary to meet him. Grandma Mary could be his angel, rather than the naked babies in all the portraits. (As long as Grandma Mary wasn’t naked too, at least.)

He’d been told it was all light and fun and dreams and memories. Maybe some of that was true, he decided when he rounded the corner to the staircase. Maybe some of it was real.

The light and the fun wasn’t the real part. Someone had lied at some point.

Grandma Mary isn’t here. It’s just Steve and the people who’d once lived here, trapped now simply in photographs and the walls of the House.

He bounds up the steps, to the Red Room, and misses the way his own legs skip over something on the ground. He calls out to Dad, because hide-and-seek should be over by the time someone starts talking since it is so easy to be found then.

He calls out to Mom, and Theo and Luke and Nell and Shirley. Calls out to Dad again, runs away from the Door and disappears behind the corner, not stopping to listen to the footsteps he leaves behind.

The Door is cracked open, the Room open and bare, and he disappears until he has to stop and wipe the smudges from his cheeks. Old blood is black, he knows that from all the books he made himself read out of sight from Mom and Dad, and he wonders, vaguely, why his fingers are crusted in black.

 

(Death is memory, yet it doesn’t allow you to remember everything. Only the important parts, and maybe Steve wasn’t the most important part of his own existence.)

 

The woman still whispers in his ear, even though she’s gone. She’s gone, and still here, and Steve knows he must look like her.

Steve knows, he thinks. He thinks he knows, and wishes that he didn’t.

 

_(“Your eyes are black, Sugar.”)_

 

He looks out the window, and traces his lips with his fingers; tries to tell a difference where there shouldn’t be one. He’s a reflection, a mirage ( _a wish, a dream. A regret.)_ and now he just rubs at his eyes like a little kid.

He’s not little. He’s not a kid anymore.

But he’s just about old enough to die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since we don't have a definitive timeline over the night where this takes place, I placed Steve's "little" breakdown in an hour, and given that we don't actually see Liv walk away from her own body until Hugh looks down from the staircase, she doesn't appear to Steve in this chapter.
> 
> Steve also doesn't see Liv's body, simply jumping over it without thinking, because death, as theorized in this, is an odd memory; Steve the Ghost doesn't see Liv because he is, in that moment, trapped in a memory and his own mind of that area of the House. She's there, but Steve's memories doesn't allow him to see her (if that makes any sort of sense. It probably doesn't.)

**Author's Note:**

> You can find my [Tumblr](http://mathildahilda.tumblr.com) here!


End file.
